Results tagged “courgette”

While staying with Erhan Şeker on Turkey’s Aegean coast, we watched in awe as he whipped up dish after dish in front of us in no time at all.  Erhan likes to use plenty of herbs (his aim is to grow all 250 herbs in his ‘Herbs and Spices of the World’ book, and he’s making good progress), and he likes his food to be simple, fast and fresh.  He also loves inventing new dishes and trying them out on passing culinary anthropologists.  

To demonstrate these principles he went out and picked a bunch of fresh oregano, sliced up a couple of small courgettes and had this delicious salad on our plates in what seemed like seconds.  Cooking from scratch does not need to be labour intensive.  I think it would also work well with other herbs, such as basil, parsley or dill.  To keep the flavours simple, I’d just use one herb though, two at the most.

This soup might sound too plain and simple to be very interesting, but it is very delicious.  It is the first soup I was asked to make at Chez Panisse, and I've made it several times since at work and at home.  (It was not the soup that ended up in the compost, so you can trust me on this one.)  It is creamy, sweet and delicious.  The trick is to get a good balance between corny and courgettey flavours.  You might be tempted to substitute tinned corn for cobs, but please don’t.

We are still getting corn here, but I guess the season may have ended in the UK - ?  Judging by the Halloween decorations ALREADY out on our neighbours' houses, it must be 'fall', so I guess recipes will be moving over to the celeriac/potato/roast meat variety quite soon.  I'm going to have to send you one more corn recipe first though, as there are just too many important corn facts I feel compelled to write up.  For instance, did you know that one quarter of the c.45,000 products sold in the average American supermarket contain corn?  Find out more about corn's domestication of the human race next week...

"This recipe ... seems to be possessed of a multitude of virtues, the ease of its preparation and the beauty of its presentation being not among the least; the breasts, moreover, being both protected from the direct onslaught of heat and nourished by the melting fats of the stuffing, remain moist and are delicately perfumed; the skin, basted from within as well as from without, crispens evenly to a rich golden brown, a miracle of beauty and flavour; it is elastic and, unlike stuffed flesh, will not shrink in contact with the heat, splitting beneath the presence of a swelling forcemeat."

These are the words of Richard Olney, an American food writer who lived in Provence and whose recipe I'm sending you an adaptation of this week.  If they aren't enough to tempt you I don't know what is.  Richard died in 1999.  He became a bit of a cult figure and had a reputation for enjoying a colourful lifestyle within France’s gastronomic social circles.

You can make the stuffing with other vegetables too, such as sautéed wild mushrooms, parboiled peas, or roasted aubergine, and the addition of little bacon, pancetta or prosciutto pieces can only be a good thing.

Sorry for the delay in getting you this week's recipe.  After our Thanksgiving cooking extravaganza weekend in the redwoods I was torn between too many things to write up for you.  You nearly got seared scallops with orange tarragon beurre blanc, or navarin of lamb with herby polenta, or tarte tatin with spicy crème anglaise, or green beans with ginger butter, or sweet yams with pancetta, or celeriac lasagne, or ....  Maybe another week.